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A report on the Ntvmsnbc.com news portal on 17 April, 2008, raised a new evolutionary myth “manufactured” on the subject of the origin of elephants. Under the heading “The ancestor of the elephant lived in water 37 million years ago,” the report suggested that the ancestor of the modern elephant was a water-dwelling creature with a lifestyle similar to that of the hippopotamus and lived 37 million years in the past.

A report on the Ntvmsnbc.com news portal on 17 April, 2008, raised a new evolutionary myth “manufactured” on the subject of the origin of elephants. Under the heading “The ancestor of the elephant lived in water 37 million years ago,” the report suggested that the ancestor of the modern elephant was a water-dwelling creature with a lifestyle similar to that of the hippopotamus and lived 37 million years in the past. In terms of the manner in which ntvmsnbc.com reported this claim, the use of the expression “scientists have established that…” was intended to give an impression of complete certainty. The fact is, however, that the depiction of the results of this study as supporting evolution and the way that ntvmsnbc.com reported this as if it were an incontrovertible fact are totally misleading. There is no existing or even potential evidence on the subject, and the claim is nothing more than an unscientific myth. This means that the study in question constitutes no evidence for the theory of evolution and is no more than conjecture produced on the basis of evolutionist hypotheses.

The data obtained are limited to the way of feeding of two species and represent no evidence for evolution.

The research reported by ntvmsnbc.com was carried out by a team from Oxford University in England and Stony Brook University in New York, the results of which were published in the journal PNAS, produced by the American Academy of Sciences.

The study in question was an investigation of the oxygen and carbon isotopes in the dental remains of Moeritherium and Barytherium, unearthed in northern Egypt and estimated to have lived 37 million years ago (isotopes are forms of chemical elements with varying numbers of neutrons - namely atomic weights. Scientists investigate these in fossils because they provide clues about the distant past). As a result of the study the researchers concluded that the two species generally fed on fresh water vegetation, and that Barytherium also ate plants living on dry land. As we have seen, the findings only provided data regarding the two fossils’ dental remains, and therefore about those creatures alone.

The claim that the ancestor of the elephant lived in water is the sort of idea that the researchers had adopted as a dogma right from the very outset. Since they have adopted the hypothesis, a parallel one to materialist philosophy, that all living things came into existence through natural processes and by evolving from other life forms, they assume that the elephant also evolved with an inheritance from other life forms. On the basis of the similarity manufactured between elephants and Moeritherium and Barytherium, they interpret the latter as the ancestors of the former. To put it another way, they interpret the data in the light of their own hypotheses and then display a logical “vicious circle” by claiming that their hypotheses are confirmed by those data. Yet nowhere in this vicious circle is their any scientific evidence in favour of this imaginary process of evolution.

Ntvmsnbc.com"s biased news reporting

In terms of the manner in which the report was carried by foreign agencies, it is obvious that ntvmsnbc.com reported the research in question in a biased way based on Darwinist preconceptions. In a statement given to Discovery News, Bill Sanders, a Michigan University palaeontologist, said that he regarded the isotope analysis as “first class and intelligent in terms of showing that these creatures lived partly in water.” However, Sanders also said that he was sceptical of the construction of an evolutionary relationship between these animals and elephants.

Yet the “hypotheses” of the researchers who carried out the study are surprisingly reported as “scientific fact” in the ntvmsnbc.com report, and Sanders’ highly apposite objection was not mentioned. Obviously there is nothing objective about such reporting. As it has done many times before, ntvmsnbc.com is using fictitious conjecture as a propaganda tool, simply because it supports Darwinism, and never tells its readers how the claims in the study are mere speculation and that, moreover, they are the subject of objections from other researchers.

Conclusion

We advise the ntvmsnbc.com management to reconsider these biased reports intended to mislead the public by covering up the true facts and to put an end to their attempts to resuscitate Darwinism, a theory that has collapsed in the face of modern science. Living things did not emerge as a result of blind coincidences in natural processes, as materialist philosophy and Darwinism, its manifestation in the field of biology, would have us believe, but as a result of the infinite Wisdom and Power of Almighty God and His commanding them to “Be!”